Manhood and the US Republican Empire

This chapter shows how republican and imperial grammars of manhood, and the gender order in which they were embedded, defined boundaries of civic and political inclusion in three areas of United States law and policy: the military, land and labor, and immigration. In each, specific models of labor, marriage, and domestic life defined manliness, conferring full privileges of citizenship on some men but denying it to others. Even as they generated racial and class distinctions, grammars of manhood also created openings for challenges by subordinate and marginal men. These dynamics included bids to create an egalitarian interracial republic followed by racist backlash, competition between yeoman ideals and liberal political economy’s manly wage-earning domestic provider, and alternative marriage practices among immigrants and their policing—all in the context of the nation’s colonial past, its aggressive territorial expansionism, and patterns of global labor migration shared with other former slave-based regimes.

Citizenship · Colonialism · Competition (biology) · Context (archaeology) · Empire · Expansionism · Geography · Immigration · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Law · Race, History, and American Society